It’s not often that a disposable jump-scare horror will send you scrambling for a copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Sapiens, yet such is the allure of this quietly brainy British feature debut that extra reading seems almost essential. The setting is 45,000 years ago, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, and the starting point for this particular narrative is that landmark migration, several thousand years before, in which scientists agree that Homo sapiens began to leave Africa for the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East.
Our six adventurous protagonists, who have nonetheless washed up in Scotland (sat-nav issues?), include the fearsome warrior leader Adem (Chuku Modu), his hopeless younger brother Geirr (Kit Young) and the recalcitrant teenage “stray” Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green). The gang have barely had time to establish personality types and fasten their natty wolfskin jackets before they’re set upon in the middle of the night by unseen bloodthirsty attackers.
What unfolds is on the surface a very familiar cat-and-mouse horror, with shades of Pitch Black and Dog Soldiers, as a band of eccentric characters are gradually and gruesomely picked apart until the tables are turned in a climactic confrontation. The difference here is in the attention to palaeolithic detail and the emotional sincerity that the film-makers, including the debut director Andrew Cumming and the debut feature writer Ruth Greenberg, bring to the material.
The cast, for instance, speak a fictitious language, translated with subtitles, that is part Basque, Arabic and Sanskrit, and is the result of a collaboration with academic advisers and archaeological consultants. Meanwhile the movie’s neatly played “twist” wrings deep feeling from the ideas that it expresses about human evolution and the so-called “advance” of civilisation. That the acting remains uniformly convincing, sometimes moving, even as the performers speak (thoughtfully conceived) gibberish, is an astounding achievement.
★★★★☆
15, 87min
In cinemas from February 23
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